The Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday displaced fellow African nation Niger to gain the unenviable distinction of being the worst place in the world to be a mother, according to the annual report of Save the Children.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa took up each of the bottom ten places for the first time first time in the 14 years that the report has been produced.

More than 300,000 babies die within 24 hours of being born in India each year from infections and other preventable causes, a report said Tuesday, blaming a lack of political will and funding for the crisis.

India accounts for 29 percent of all newborn deaths worldwide, according to the charity Save the Children which published the findings at the launch of its annual State of the World's Mothers report.

The death toll from the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in China has risen to 31, according to official figures, with four more people dying of the virus in China's eastern provinces.

The number of people infected also increased to 129, official statistics showed, up two since Thursday.

A new SARS-like virus has killed two more people in Saudi Arabia, taking the number of deaths from the coronavirus that the kingdom has announced to seven in one week, the health ministry said.

"The health ministry has announced that three infections by the new coronavirus have been registered during the past days in al-Ahsaa. Two of the victims have died while the third is in a stable condition," state news agency SPA said late Sunday.

Peter Nguyen was a promising medical student when his school learned that he had tested positive for the hepatitis B virus. He said he was blackballed by school administrators and forced to halt his studies.

"I knew the stigma" that came with a hepatitis diagnosis, Nguyen said. But he thought that a medical school, of all places, would understand. "I came there expecting help. Instead, I was greeted with discrimination."

Men who are bashful about needing help in the bedroom no longer have to go to the drugstore to buy that little blue pill.

In a first for the drug industry, Pfizer Inc. told The Associated Press that the drugmaker will begin selling its popular erectile dysfunctionpill Viagra directly to patients on its website.

A child has contracted polio for the first time in Pakistan's militant-infested tribal belt since the Taliban banned vaccinations a year ago, a U.N. official said Monday.

"The new case has been detected in North Waziristan where we had been denied access in June last year," the World Health Organization's senior coordinator for polio eradication in Pakistan, Elias Durry, told AFP.

The Man Nyon Pharmacy is lined with rows of colorful packages containing everything from dried bear bile and deer antler elixir to tiger bone paste and ginseng. But the ancient "Koryo" medicine provided at this popular dispensary isn't just for minor aches and pains.

It has been integrated into the health system from the smallest village clinic all the way up to the nicest showcase hospitals in the privileged capital of Pyongyang. Both modern and traditional styles of healing have long been uniquely intertwined nationwide with doctors from both schools working in tandem under one roof.

Immunologists expressed concern Friday about the "dangerous" work of scientists in China who created a hybrid bird flu virus that can spread in the air between guinea pigs, and now lives in a lab freezer.

The team from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Gansu Agricultural University wrote in the journal Science they had created a new virus by mixing genes from H5N1 "bird flu" and H1N1 "swine flu".

Five Saudis who died after contracting a new SARS-like virus last week had not travelled abroad, a health ministry doctor said on Saturday.

"After questioning relatives, it turned out that none of these people had been abroad before being infected," Dr Ziad Mimish, who heads the ministry's disease prevention unit, told Agence France Presse.